DEAR FRIEND,
I have your letter of 19th November. I have not been able to understand
it, in spite of the help I sought from Charlie Andrews.
I have no hesitation in agreeing with you that any solution of the
present deadlock should be just and creative, and that it should be
neither imposed nor extorted; in other words, it should be an agreed
solution honourable to both the countries. I know too the suffering
of India and the suffering of Lancashire. But if the juxtaposition
of the two is meant to imply that the cause of the suffering of either
is identical I would dissent from any such view. The suffering of
India is imposed upon her; the suffering of Lancashire is due partly
to world causes and partly to its own short¬sightedness and selfishness.
So far as it was possible for me to suggest an alleviation of the
suffering of Lancashire through India's help I had made a definite
offer when I was in England in 1931. But my offer proved to be of
no avail. The offer was this: If there was a free settlement between
England and India, a favoured-nation clause was quite possible, in
so far as India might need any foreign cloth in order to supplement
her output of cloth, whether through the village spinning wheel or
through her mills. I do not know how far such treatment is possible
today for, even during the short period that has elapsed since the
meeting of the Round Table Conference, India has become better organized
for the manufacture of all her clothing requirements, in spite of
the fact that she is importing fine-count calico both from England
and Japan. The chief point, however, is not how Lancashire can send
its calico to India, but how the whole of England can benefit in every
way by the benefit that India must derive from attainment of complete
freedom, political and economic. The more I study the villages of
India the more intensely do I realize that India has no need to be
a pauper country if she can get the chance to grow without the fetters
that today prevent her natural growth.
Your last paragraph seems to imply that there is no longer any repression
in India. I can only tell you that repression is there to be seen
by anyone with the naked eye. I do not know of any single repressive
law that has been repealed. The Press is effectively gagged, there
is no such thing as freedom of movement in Bengal as also in the Frontier
Province. If you hear nothing of imprisonments and lathi charges it
is because civil disobedience is suspended and the Congress has resolved,
in furtherance of the spirit of non-violence, to submit to repressive
laws in so far as it is humanly possible to do so. On the top of all
this comes the Parliamentary Committee's proposals for a new constitution.
It is, as I read it, a bare-faced denial of freedom. I see in it no
scope for expansion. I would any day prefer the existing state to
the crushing burden that threatens to overwhelm India and tighten
the British hold upon her. My own power of endurance is being tested
beyond my capacity my way to the Frontier Province is blocked.
But, in spite of the blackness of the horizon, I have no sense of
despair in me. I believe in the existence of a beneficent Power that
overrides and upsets all human plans. It ever produces order out of
chaos, and redresses wrongs in spite of the tyranny of tyrants.
India must come to her own one day. But she will do so chiefly if
her own sons and daughters behave themselves and prove worthy of her
freedom. We must exert our utmost to prove our worth, and you, friends
of Conciliation Group, will, I know, do your level best according
to your lights to help a just solution.